Jeff Mitchell: City polling shows support for general tax approach

Nov. 14, 2013

Jeff Mitchell / The Salinas Californian

Written by

Under the Dome

To no one’s great surprise, it turns out that most of you really want better public safety services.

According to a bar chart analysis of some 400 citizen survey responses accumulated by the city, a copy of which was obtained by The Californian on Wednesday, Salinans are getting serious about their desire to beef up the city’s emaciated police and fire departments as well as the city’s code enforcement division.

Asked to respond to 10 questions ranging from fixing potholes to providing more recreation services for kids, the respondents indicated that law and order is a critical first priority.

The call-in, computer-prompted survey had respondents rank from 0 to 5 their preferences -- 5 representing their highest preference.

The category “Maintain rapid response times for police, fire and paramedic programs” scored the highest ranking at 4.56.

Following that was “Enhance anti-gang and youth violence prevention programs” which scored 4.08. Right behind that was “Maintain neighborhood police patrols” at 4.05.

Coming in at 3.94 was “Support activities for children and teens such as after-school programs, homework ....”

The fifth-highest rated priority of the survey respondents was “Repair and upgrade aging recreation centers and parks to provide safe places to children ....” This idea pulled in a score 3.90.

Coming in last were questions about the importance of fire and safety inspections and senior citizen programing; these garnered scores of 3.56 and 3.57, respectively.

All in all, no shocking surprises. The data is interesting and would seem to signal the city’s readiness to say yes to a sales tax increase of a half- to a full cent to start generating the kind of revenue necessary to hire new public safety staff and equipment as well as to boost the city’s tiny code enforcement unit.

Though this data is interesting, we’ll be curious to see the statistics coming back from the city’s recent professional polling efforts. The City Council is due to formally review the results at its meeting Tuesday.

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One informed source said that 69 percent of those polled said they would support a generalized sales tax increase in support of public safety, code enforcement and other critical needs facing the city.

Only 63 to 65 percent of the respondents, however, told the city’s pollster that they would get behind a specific sales tax increase to beef up the city’s police, fire and code enforcement efforts. Such a special sales tax would require a Herculean 66.7 percent margin (or better) to pass. A general tax, alternatively, requires a simple margin of 50 percent plus one to win.

If true, this polling info is really going to pose a political problem for those hard core specific tax proponents like Councilman Steve McShane and members of the Salinas Public Safety Tax Committee or whatever it's being called this week.

The city’s polling report is likely be one of the best-read City Hall-generated documents out there this weekend. The report should be included in the Tuesday City Council meeting agenda packet which should be due out online this evening.

Were you contacted by a city pollster? If so, email and let me know what kinds of questions you were asked and what kind of experience you had overall.

More to come on this one.

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Jeff Mitchell covers Salinas Valley politics and government. Under the Dome, an opinion column, appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday in both print and online. For quick political hits, check out Under the Dome - The Blog which is at: www.theCalifornian.com is available most every day.